Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzunwas a French-born American historian. Focusing on ideas and culture, he wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball and classical music. He was also known as a philosopher of education. In the book Teacher in America, Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth30 November 1907
CountryUnited States of America
baseball team school
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game - and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.
men europe circles
After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.
piano-music names piano-playing
The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
yield mind tragedy
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
art memorable form
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
swings intellectual privilege
Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap
men feet air
A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.
limits capacity
The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.
writing opposites names
Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way
rivers steps
You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
art writing unique
Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.
art strong philosophy
It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
spring ideas feelings
Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
pride vanity static
Vanity is a static thing. It puts it faith in what it has, and is easily wounded. Pride is active, and satisfied only with what it can do, hence accustomed not to feel small stings.